Columbus wants to build an NWSL Championship contender from day one: Whitney Haslam Johnson interview
· Yahoo Sports
When Whitney Haslam Johnson thinks about Columbus’ first National Women’s Soccer League game at ScottsMiracle-Gro Field in 2028, the governor of the league’s newest franchise envisions a stadium filled with fans, facilities that reflect a commitment to providing the best for female athletes and a squad featuring homegrown talent, U.S. women’s national team players and some of Europe’s top stars.
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“All of the above,” Haslam Johnson, who is also a Haslam Sports Group (HSG) managing partner, tells The Athletic a few days before breaking ground on the team’s 45,000 square-foot training facility. “We are going to make sure that we build a squad that we can win trophies.”
HSG, which also owns MLS’ Columbus Crew and NFL’s Cleveland Browns, paid a $205 million expansion fee to bring an NWSL franchise to Columbus, one of the largest investments made for entry into a women’s professional sports league. The fee was nearly double Denver Summit’s $110 million fee in 2025 and $40 million more than what Arthur Blank paid for Atlanta City FC only a few months before Columbus. The average franchise is valued at $184 million per Sportico’s latest valuations.
However, Haslam Johnson says their investment is about more than securing a place in one of the fastest-growing segments of professional sports. It is an opportunity to apply the infrastructure, commercial relationships and experience of an established sports ownership group to a women’s soccer club built with its own identity.
The timing was deliberate.
“We’re always evaluating opportunities around the ecosystem of sports,” Haslem Johnson says. “We’ve been in touch with the NWSL over the past several years, learning about the league, learning about the priorities, and I think the more we learned, the more excited we got.”
Seeing Denver’s sold-out opener at Empower Field at Mile High with over 60,000 seats and Gotham FC’s Queens Classic at Citi Field, only added to her excitement about the league’s potential. “When we see that, we are just blown away,” she says.
But Columbus is not starting from scratch. Since acquiring the Crew in 2019, the Haslams have invested in a downtown stadium, rebuilt the club’s staff and helped establish it as one of MLS’ more successful franchises, with two MLS Cup wins in 2020 and 2023.
“After the Haslams bought the team and put all this investment into it, we felt like we were in a good place as an organization to do it correctly for a second team, for a women’s team,” Mary Shepro, president of business operations for both Columbus teams, says. “We wanted to make sure that when we invested in bringing an NWSL team here, that we could do it the way that we wanted to do it, which is at the highest level.”
One of Columbus’ biggest advantages over other expansion teams is that it won’t need to build a soccer-specific stadium. The club will play at the Crew’s approximately 20,000-seat stadium in downtown Columbus. Earlier this year it hosted a sold-out U.S. women’s national team game against Canada in the SheBelieves Cup, with Emma Sears, who grew up in Ohio, among the players on the field. Two years earlier, another sold-out crowd watched the U.S. defeat Canada on penalties in the 2024 edition of the tournament.
“We built it with the intent of hosting a wide variety of events,” Haslam Johnson says. “We wanted it to be a platform, a national stage for a lot of different types of events. We set it up in a way that we can easily bring on another team.”
Still sharing a stadium with an established MLS franchise presents a different challenge: How do you make sure the women’s team feels like an equal partner rather than an afterthought?
That process is already in place, says Shepro, and stadium modifications are already underway to give the NWSL team its own presence, including a new locker room designed specifically for the women’s players. “We don’t want it to feel like a second or third tenant,” Shepro says. “We want it to feel like this is your home when you’re a player, a fan.”
Although they will share an ownership group and certain resources, the women’s team will have its own business staff, including dedicated employees in ticketing, corporate partnership, marketing and other commercial departments.
“They’re siblings. They’re growing up in the same household, the same city, but they’re not seven-year-olds. They don’t hate each other,” Shepro says. “They’re not yelling at mom and dad.”
That commitment to giving the women’s team its own identity is most evident in the decision to build a dedicated training facility rather than simply share the Crew’s existing one.
The new OhioHealth training center, scheduled for completion in January 2028, is being developed with the Crew’s OhioHealth Performance Center as a reference point. But Haslam Johnson says it was essential that the new facility not simply replicate the men’s training environment. “It was really important to us that we designed this for the female athletes.”
The plans include expanded recovery areas with hot and cold treatments, dedicated mental health resources, a women’s room, childcare facilities and spaces where players can create social media content. Although its immediate purpose is to serve the NWSL team, it will have two fully equipped locked rooms capable of accommodating another professional team if HSG expand again.
That flexibility could also prove valuable as the NWSL considers how to develop a more comprehensive youth pathway. “It is absolutely part of our vision that we would like to have a place where we can develop and grow youth soccer all the way through,” Haslam Johnson says.
Facilities and infrastructure alone won’t win championships. Columbus took the first step toward assembling its inaugural roster, hiring former Bay FC and Portland Thorns general manager Lucy Rushton to lead the club’s sporting operations. Rushton is working on the team’s recruitment strategy, with the club expecting to begin more substantive player acquisition work in the coming months.
For Columbus, which will join an 18-team NWSL in 2028, getting an early start on recruitment could be particularly important. The club will enter an increasingly competitive global market for talent. NWSL teams are no longer competing only against one another for top players, as European clubs have become more willing to spend substantial sums on transfers and salaries.
But before supporters can buy jerseys bearing the names of their favorite players, the club needs a name of its own. The franchise has yet to reveal its name, crest or colors but the ownership group is working with supporters and community stakeholders on the branding process. For a franchise carrying a nine-figure expansion fee, the brand launch will be one of its first major tests.
Building that connection with supporters will be particularly important in a city where soccer already has a strong following. In 2018, the Crew’s supporters successfully campaigned to save the team from relocation under its previous ownership.
“The biggest thing for us is that the squad and the team and the brand, everything about this club, makes Ohioans so proud to be a part of it,” Shepro says.
Columbus could soon have another advantage: a natural regional rival. With the possibility of Racing Louisville relocating to Cincinnati under new ownership, Columbus could find itself competing in a local derby, one already familiar to the club thanks to the “Hell is Real” derby between the Crew and FC Cincinnati.
Tim Bezbatchenko, HSG’s president of global soccer, believes geographic rivalries can play an important role in building a fan base.
“Geographic proximity is a key part to building rivalries,” he says. “So whether or not a team is in Louisville or Cincinnati, we think that we can build incredible rivalry that will be part of our building our fan base and having these memorable experiences that we believe are fundamental to sports.”
2028 will be a busy year for the Haslam’s. In addition to launching their NWSL team, Columbus will host nine soccer matches for the 2028 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games hosted by Los Angeles. Additionally, Columbus and Cleveland prepared a joint bid to host matches during the 2031 Women’s World Cup, which will take place in the U.S., Mexico, Costa Rica and Jamaica. Haslam’s proposal would combine the stadium in Columbus with the Cleveland Browns’ planned domed stadium in Brook Park, Cleveland.
For HSG, the prospect of hosting the world’s biggest women’s soccer tournament three years after launching its NWSL franchise would offer another opportunity to capitalize on the sport’s growth. But before Columbus can welcome the world in 2031. It has the more immediate challenge of turning a $205 million investment, a new training facility and an established soccer infrastructure into a club Ohioans can call it their own.
“I think it is at an extremely pivotal time ,” Haslem Johnson says, pointing to the 2026 men’s World Cup, the Olympics in 2028 and the 2031 Women’s World Cup, as opportunities to accelerate soccer’s growth in the United States. “And it’s going to continue to grow. The evolution of female athletes and having the most amazing players play in the United States being one of the top leagues, I think is really exciting.”
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Columbus Crew, NWSL, Women's Soccer
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